Improving weekend handover between junior doctors on medical and surgical wards.
Date
2014-01-03Journal
BMJ quality improvement reportsType
Journal ArticlePublisher
BMJDOI
10.1136/bmjquality.u483.w1045Rights
Archived with thanks to BMJ Quality Improvement Reports. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcodeMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Poor weekend handover has been implicated as one of the causes of observed higher mortality rates at weekends in UK hospitals. In a large teaching hospital we, a group of junior doctors, set about improving the quality and effectiveness of weekend handover. We used the Model for Improvement to implement a weekend handover sticker through an iterative process using multiple Plan/Do/Study/Act (PDSA) cycles. Over the 16 week study period the number of completed weekend tasks increased by 30% and the number of patients with a documented weekend handover increased by nearly 50%. Junior doctors are well positioned to notice the quality and safety shortcomings within hospitals, and by using effective improvement methods they can improve these systems at little or no cost.